Michael Simkins's List: Defining Student Success

• “This push on tests,” he told me, “is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human.”
• Seligman surprised them both by pulling out a new and very different book, which he and Peterson had just finished: “Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification,” a scholarly, 800-page tome that weighed in at three and a half pounds. It was intended, according to the authors, as a “manual of the sanities,” an attempt to inaugurate what they described as a “science of good character.”
• KIPP’s stated goal: that 75 percent of KIPP alumni will graduate from a four-year college, and 100 percent will be prepared for a stable career.
• Grit Scale.
• zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity.

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• Our curiosity about student definitions of “success” originated within the larger dialogue about the relationship between culturally entrenched beliefs about success and their effects on learning. In Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell claims we have made many false assumptions about how successful individuals reach their potential. “Success,” he writes, “follows a predictable course. It is not the brightest that succeed,” but those lucky enough to “have been given opportunities — and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”
• our research team decided to track the entire class of 2009, factoring in variables we assumed might correlate with academic success over time: academic support required; subjects studied; course load; middle school head’s judgment of aptitude prior to ninth grade; advisor and class dean’s judgment of students’ social competence; course rigor; students’ own judgment of their connectedness to at least one adult in school; students’ race, class, and gender; and a traditional measure of academic aptitude: SSAT scores. Using GPA as our dependent measure, we then built a statistical model to predict 11th graders’ achievement

• Expeditionary Learning measures student success based on three indicators: academic achievement, quality of student work, and evidence of engagement.

• Former UCLA men's basketball coach John Wooden's Pyramid of Success is his careful selection and arrangement of the habits that are the fundamentals of his definition of success, which is "peace of mind that is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best that you are capable of becoming."

• Roethlisberger argues that people who are preoccupied with success ask the wrong question. They ask, “what is the secret of success” when they should be asking, “what prevents me from learning here and now?” To be overly preoccupied with the future is to be inattentive toward the present where learning and growth take place. To walk around asking, “am I a success or a failure” is a silly question in the sense that the closest you can come to answer is to say, everyone is both a success and a failure.

• I had a conversation with a friend yesterday who has worked in the surf industry for many years.  We were discussing business, the economy and life.

   

  He was complimenting me on my great success.  This is a man I respect.

   

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I feel like a failure.